On December 8, 2013, the Al Jazeera America television station aired a science story on the NASA-funded ENDURANCE project, a collaboration of University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), Stone Aerospace, NASA Ames Research Center and Montana State University. The story profiles principal investigator Peter Doran of the UIC Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, co-investigator Andrew Johnson, an associate professor in the UIC Department of Computer Science and director of research of the UIC Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL), and PhD computer science student and EVL research assistant Alessandro Febretti.

For ENDURANCE (Environmentally Non-Disturbing Under-ice Robotic ANtarctiC Explorer), project members are analyzing 3D biogeochemical information captured by an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) in the extreme environment of West Lake Bonney, a perennially ice-covered Antarctic dry valley lake in the McMurdo Dry Valleys of Antarctica. The goal is to further biological research in terrestrial environments analogous to those found on other planets, and to develop technologies that enable remote searches for, and identification of, life in extreme environments. Project members are developing visualizations of the various types of data captured by the AUV and using EVL’s CAVE2™ Hybrid Reality Environment and SAGE software to view the data and related 2D and 3D images simultaneously for analysis and insight.

View the Al Jazeera America broadcast

Learn more about the ENDURANCE project

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